Development and prosperity of a telecommunication market bring gradual expansion and maturity of a basic telecommunication service market. Many users in a government, an enterprise, or the like are connected to an operator network by using a third-party application server and perform user group communication by using a public network. A user group described herein includes all or some user terminals in industry users served by the third-party application server.
In the prior art, when a user group served by a third-party application server needs to download background traffic, for example, to upgrade a terminal application or update a terminal database, each user terminal in the user group sends a background traffic downloading request to the third-party application server. Then, the third-party application server forwards the background traffic downloading request to a PCRF (policy and charging rules function) unit on an operator network. The PCRF formulates a background traffic downloading policy for each user terminal in the user group, and formulates, according to the background traffic downloading policy of each user terminal, a specific network transmission policy that can satisfy the background traffic downloading request of the user group, that is, formulates policy control and charging control in background traffic downloading performed by each user terminal.
However, user terminals in a group may need to download same background traffic. According to the method in the prior art, a PCRF needs to repeatedly respond to all same background traffic downloading requests forwarded by a third-party application server. This brings unnecessary network overheads.